When submitting an assignment, the University of Leicester (UoL) uses a submission network called Turnitin. To submit assignments, students must consent to the policies of Turnitin that allow the network to use student’s work as they please within the constraints of the law. A key way in which this intended is to train their AI using student’s work. The privacy policy agreement of Turnitin allows student data to be used to improve artificial intelligence for the network. As a result of the rise of artificial intelligence, many students are concerned by general training of AI: which is only being further validated using their work to help with the training of a network which is supposed to protect them from accusations of using AI.

Students at UoL cannot consent to the policies of Turnitin, as agreeing to the network policies is the only way that they can submit their work. The base use of Turnitin’s AI checker already has faults in flagging students work for using AI when they haven’t or have simply not referenced properly. Should we continue to use Turnitin, especially with the changes of policies that they are planning to implement, these accusations will continue to challenge the academic integrity of students who do not deserve to have their work challenged simply because of their writing style.

By allowing Turnitin to train their AI with student work, we are allowing the network to manipulate our work to recognise the use of AI which will increase these false accusations.
Another reason for the refusal to comply to these new policies is that it is allowing the network to use students’ work. It would be a version of permission to own that student’s property. The ideas, research, time and effort that went into their assignments no longer merely their own as the network can use it how they see fit. This is not just a problem: it is unfair, unjust and immoral. The work that we spend time agonising over – work that our grades and degrees rely on – should be ours.

Why should we be forced to give the rights of our work to Turnitin? We should have a choice in whether we agree for our work to be used to train AI and until that choice doesn’t involve risking our education, it will not be our decision to make. If we cannot make that decision through Turnitin, we should have an alternative way to submit assignments that means we can actually consent to the use of our work by a network which is supposed to protect the academic integrity of assignments.